It has been common for many years for consumers to pay bills by way of a personal check written by the consumer to the order of an entity and delivered to that entity by mail or in person. With the proliferation of computers interconnected to computer networks, particularly the Internet, consumers can now pay bills electronically. However until recently it was not possible for a consumer, using a computer terminal, to interact with a single payment system capable of paying all the consumer's bills whether by electronic means or by a paper check. Such a system now exists in the form of a consolidated bill payment system as described by Kight, et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,383,113, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ELECTRONICALLY PROVIDING CUSTOMER SERVICES INCLUDING PAYMENT OF BILLS, FINANCIAL ANALYSIS AND LOANS.
Although the consolidated bill payment system described by Kight, et al. significantly advanced the state of the art, it did not focus on several problems which may arise in implementing a consolidated bill payment system capable of automatically paying consumer bills to merchants.
A typical state of the art electronic bill payment system is established by a financial institution or third party to provide subscribing customers with the capability to electronically pay registered merchants. Present day electronic bill payment systems operate in an integrated manner to collect payment requests electronically from consumers, process those requests to render them suitable for payment, and then pay the registered merchants, i.e., merchants listed in the system database. Hence, using present day systems, each has to establish relationships with both customers and merchants.
Developing and implementing a bill payment system has significant costs. First, a relationship has to be established with each merchant. Furthermore, special formatting requirements, and other rules and procedures required by each merchant for presenting payment data in a form the merchant system can process automatically must be determined and complied with. One of the features most desirable in any consolidated electronic bill payment system is that a consumer be allowed to pay any merchant to which the consumer owes a bill. Ultimately, this means that each conventional bill payment system may have hundreds of thousands of merchants in a database. Each bill payment entity must establish relationships with these merchants and comply with their special rules and procedures for the transfer of payment data. This is an expensive and time consuming process. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a way to reduce the time and expense which must now be spent by every bill payment entity to implement a consolidated bill payment system.
Another problem is that consumers or data entry personnel sometimes make mistakes in entering payment data required by the bill payment system. Such a case arises when a consumer's account number with a merchant is incorrectly entered. The payment system must submit a correct account number to the merchant who will use this account number to associate the payment with the consumer. Thus, a technique is needed to validate the submitted consumer's account number.
A data entry person may also enter payment data which incorrectly specifies the merchant's name or parts of the merchant's address. It has been found that merchant information such as the merchant name, address, zip code are typically mangled at the data entry stage. It has been further observed that errors will often be made upon entry of the zip code. The merchant's name, address, and zip code is typically required by the payment system in order to, for example, retrieve merchant records from the merchant database. If this data is incorrect, the payment system may be unable to retrieve the correct merchant's record for processing a payment. Thus, a technique is needed to correctly identify a merchant record notwithstanding the submission of erroneous merchant data.
A consolidated bill payment system must also have the capability to properly remit payments to the same merchant at more than one remittance center. Commonly a large commercial merchant, (e.g., shoe company, Sears) will have several remittance centers distributed geographically so that customers can submit bills to a center within their location. Thus, a technique is required to ensure that consumer payments are remitted to the proper one of multiple remittance centers associated with the same.
Advantageously, a consolidated payment system must also be able to handle the different processing formats and requirements of numerous separate merchant accounting systems. For example, each merchant's account system may require payment information, such as consumer account numbers, in a format different than that submitted by the consumer. For example, many merchant accounting systems will only accept an account number with some portion of a consumer's last name or the consumer's zip code appended to the end of the account number presented by the customer.
A merchant account system may even require an altered consumer account number which uniquely identifies the consumer. For example, two consumers, e.g., spouses, may have identical account numbers, but the merchant accounting system may designate the account of each consumer uniquely, such as by combining the account number with the prospective customer's name. Additionally, it is not unusual for a merchant to have different account numbers for a single customer. For example, an account number on an invoice which goes out electronically may be different from an account number for the same customer which goes out as a paper transaction.
Thus, a consolidated bill payment system must be able to handle the various formats required by the merchant accounting system of each merchant. Accordingly, a technique is required to transform payment data received from the consumer into a form compatible with a merchant's accounting system.